Photo: Multishow / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
One of Brazil’s best-selling recording artists and a fixture of Bahia’s Carnival, Ivete Sangalo has built a business portfolio around food and wellness in recent years.
The investmentIn 2024, Sangalo became a partner in Vero Brodo, a foodtech startup selling ready-to-drink broths without chemical additives, alongside nutritionist Daniel Cady and Globalfruit CEO Rafael Vaz. Within its first year the company reached roughly 800 points of sale in chains including Oba and Carrefour and about R$2 million in revenue; Sangalo’s role centers on the brand’s communication.
Source: Exame — Read the original reporting →
The scale here is very small — and that is the point
It is worth stating the numbers plainly. In its first year Vero Brodo reached roughly R$2 million in revenue across about 800 points of sale. That is a genuinely early-stage company — a promising start for a food brand, and a rounding error next to the listed companies elsewhere in this collection.
That contrast is useful. "Celebrity invests in company" reads the same in a headline whether the company is worth billions or is a two-year-old brand selling broth in supermarkets. The reporting rarely makes the difference obvious, and the difference is most of what determines how risky the position is.
What “partner” means in this deal
Sangalo's stated role centres on the brand's communication, and she came in alongside operating partners — a nutritionist and the chief executive of a fruit business. That division of labour is the honest description of what she is contributing: reach and credibility with an audience, rather than capital, supply-chain expertise or day-to-day management.
For a young consumer brand, that contribution is genuinely valuable and hard to buy. It is also why the word "partner" in these announcements should be read as a description of a working relationship rather than as a statement about how much money changed hands, which in this case was not disclosed.